Crowns off to Matty Layne Glasgow for his debut poetry collection, Deciduous Qween being chosen by Richard Blanco for Red Hen Press’ Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award in 2018. This debut collection is a forest of wonders, bejeweled with language that stings, flings, hisses and kisses all at once. This is a writer who pulls the teeth of childhood and holds them up to the light for the reader to see “like words that only shine/when they are free”, a writer who unearths the Texan landscape and sexuality in poems that burn hot and vivid.
Glasgow revises the floral blooming coming of age story into “a bed of wildflowers” with the “lust & rust of a Texas spring.” There is lust and rust and love and shame, and loss threaded throughout this collection, as a mother dies and a boy claims his sexuality and life goes on like a drag queen on stage.
The poem “how you go” includes erasures from Peter Wohlleben (author, The Secret Life of Trees) as it grapples with a mother erased from a son's life. In Deciduous Qween, people and trees are entwined as Glasgow reimagines human nature from our soiled roots to our lofty leafy limbs. Deciduous Qween will be available in June. In the meantime, here’s a taste:
Ash Mama
I never called you Mother Tree.
May I now that your body
felled you—bark sallow &
unfurling from your hollow
bones? I saw an emerald
ash borer in your pancreas,
watched it loosen your skin,
swallow you whole in one
month. They said it would
take years. I never called
you Great Ash, until
that’s what you were— dust
through my fingers, filling
your own mother’s grave.
You never called me seedling,
your weak-limbed boy—
frail-leaved & thin-veined
in shadow. Every tree needs
light, every crown wants
to rise. We each wore ours
differently. You died before
your mother. No sun
for you no head in star-
soaked canopy. You kept me
alive all the same, until
they took you away, left
your roots in the ground,
bound to mine, as if to say
Grow,baby. Reach, qween
boy. Let your crown shine.
deciduous qween, I
of teeth, being shed at the end of a period of growth
I forget how sharpness first emerged
from my jaw
the way milk teeth pushed
through tender flesh
how they scratched then chewed
the insides of my cheeks
just to tear another part of me raw.
I forget the taste of blood
a toddler’s iron
on a toddler’s tongue
the guttural scream of a small creature
whose only language was pain.
You remember. Tell me
no toddler ever teethed with such indignation
tell me your mama and I just wanted you
to be happy to be quiet. But your baby
just grew louder and louder into a gaudy
and ungodly thing
losing incisors and molars
like enamel sequins shedding canines
keen and shiny as plastic diamonds.
They’d all fall
out of my mouth like sighs
so high-pitched they shimmered
in glitter-dusted confetti.
This is how I learned to sell my body
one tooth at a time
for a quarter then a dollar
and you’d hold all the smallest parts of me
in your hand glistening white
opal stones unearthed from my gums
like words that only shine
when they are free from the dark caverns
of my unmuzzled maw.
This is how I learned to let go
for a price
those blood-stained roots
the only soft, dangling remnants
of loss.
Burnside Climb
Ruidoso, New Mexico
My hands cling to the wheel like it’s a branch,
& this mountain is just another trunk to scale,
another thing we must hoist ourselves over
to look out from its crown. You are the pristine
diamond. I am a flawed emerald, which is to say,
to this mountain, we are both adornments.
We move higher & higher still, but I’m already
there—my lungs all kushy & smoke-stained
from a morning bowl. I should not be driving,
but you are not worried. You look to the burnside
of the Sierra Blanca—pines nearly indiscernible
in their black needle-less death. The aspens, too,
those boys all char-soaked & done up with ash.
It’s hard to watch the young ones go, but we can’t
call it needless, how the flame takes the old spruce
back into the earth, & lets this forest grow again.
We reach a locked gate & park. The hike up
to the lookout sores my lungs & all my soft edges,
slack & full of winter’s sloth. All I see is shadow,
trunk after trunk an effigy, what the fire leaves
behind in its climb. You wait several yards ahead—
sleeves rolled & hand shading your face—looking.
Here’s where the flames stopped: the half-burned
pine, the aspen un-singed, the spruce still ever-
green. Here’s where I catch up to you, where we
follow the white of thriving aspens up to the peak.
How these boys up here must have quaked to
the crackling of barkskin, how their blond leaves
must have flickered all night in the light of nearby
fire. How my lungs feel like those rings within them
now—here, but shaken. Or like us for that matter,
remembering what it is to burn without the flames.
Bayou Baby
Hurricane Harvey, August 27, 2017
I.
When I was a child, I followed
a nutria up out the ditch, which
is to say we came from the same
place. My little hands smeared
muddy paw prints. My fingers
sunk into a water-swept incline.
I couldn’t catch up to those buck
teeth, to that grey fur & snake
tail all awash in ocean rain. I said
Bye, you. I asked, Where you going?
I said I’m scared of this water, too.
II.
A woman rose from that soggy refuge—
orchid bloom & alligator teeth in her
dirty blond hair. I called her mother.
I asked Mama, where you been? I said
I just wanna stay
by you.
Her eyes were the severe green
of that dangerous sky. Her body
was covered in ocean—water so
dirty it glistened like a silver gown.
She said I’m gonna wear this storm out.
III.
I learned to love a man the same
way I love the bayou—I got used
to his beauty. How much can you
take for me? How much will you
hold before you crest? I know you
just want to protect me. I can’t stay.
IV.
There are two dried petals & 13 teeth
on my daddy’s mantle. He just sits at
home alone, waiting for the dirty water
to rise, to bring all that death to his
front porch. He’d welcome it inside too,
if he didn’t love sitting in the rain so much.
& he’d leave if he could walk on water,
if he had somewhere else to go.
V.
There’s a tuft of grey fur atop the fence
out back, a thin-scaled tail that hangs &
dips in the silver flow. A voice escapes
those buck teeth. Where you going? it asks.
Bye, you.
Matty Layne Glasgow Bio
Matty Layne Glasgow is the author of the poetry collection, deciduous qween, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in June 2019. His recent poems appear in the Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, Crazyhorse, Poetry Daily, Grist, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod, & elsewhere. He received his MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University & currently lives in Houston, where he teaches with Writers in the Schools. Find him on Twitter @Matty_Layne or visit him at mattylayne.com.
“Ash Mama” first appeared in Nimrod and “deciduous qween, I” and “Bayou Baby” were previously published in The Missouri Review.